World Golf Rankings: Top 10 Men's and Women's

Keep up to date with the game's top 10 players in both the Official World Golf Rankings (men) and Rolex World Golf Rankings (women)

The Official World Golf Rankings – shortened to OWGR – is a system used to rate the performance levels of male professional golfers. It was first introduced in 1986 and is endorsed by the four major championships and six professional golf tours, these are the PGA Tour, European Tour, Asian Tour, PGA Tour of Australasia, Japan Golf Tour and the Sunshine Tour.

How are the World Golf Rankings calculated?

The system used to calculate the rankings can be confusing.

Golfers receive points based on their performance and the quality of the event that they are playing in. Points remain on a player’s tally for two years but are reduced on a sliding scale of 13 weeks so more recent success carries a greater weighting.

A player’s points tally is calculated by dividing the number of points by the number of events they have played in over the two year period with a minimum of 40 events needed to obtain a ranking. The World Golf Rankings are updated every Monday.

How the OWGR changed in 2022

After a lengthy review process, the Official World Golf Ranking changed to a new system in 2022.

One of the main changes to the system will see ranking points awarded to all players who make the cut in a tournament using a strength of field rating. This will use a statistical evaluation of every player in that particular tournament, rather than just those ranked in the top 200.

This means pro tours will also no longer be handed extra points for so-called “flagship events” – like the European Tour’s BMW PGA Championship, for example – though The Players at TPC Sawgrass will still carry 80 points for the winner. Major championships will continue to award 100 points.

“What these reviews revealed was that through the use of assigned values in its strength-of-field calculation, which includes tour minimums, flagship tournaments and the home tour rating, there was some level of bias in the system,” said Bill Schroder of the OWGR technical committee. “Which means there was some level of performances that were either being undervalued or overvalued.”

The start date for the new system was August 14, 2022 – but as it still operates on a two-year cycle, changes will not come into effect until 2024.